Mercer baseball wins regular season SoCon title, enters tournament red-hot

As the Mercer baseball team was about to secure its first regular season Southern Conference championship in almost a decade last weekend, longtime head coach Craig Gibson asked a few of his players a question.

Mercer clinched a share of the SoCon title with a victory over East Tennessee State on Saturday, so the Bears knew that after their regular season finale Sunday, they could celebrate.

“I asked a few of the guys Saturday, ‘Are you guys going to dogpile, you know, do a big celebration?’” Gibson said.

He got an answer that indicated how laser-focused this Mercer team has been all season.

“They said, ‘No, coach, we want to save it,’” Gibson recalled Tuesday from the Bears’ bus up to the SoCon tournament in Greenville. “This team never looks ahead, but they also know what the expectations are.”

High — that’s what the expectations are, especially after Mercer ripped the second half of its regular season schedule to shreds and finished with a sweep of ETSU, a 43-13 overall record and the No. 1 seed in the SoCon tournament that begins this week.

The weekend sweep of the Buccaneers, who came into the weekend ranked fourth but fell to seventh after Mercer won all three games, saw the Bears’ offense continue its torrid hot stretch. The Bears rank third in the country in home runs with 124. Left fielder Chris Katz was named the SoCon’s Player of the Year on Tuesday after finishing with a .374 average, 20 home runs, 17 doubles and 71 RBIs. Gibson won Coach of the Year honors for the conference, and Mercer had nine players make the All-Conference team.

“Obviously we were offensive, and the ballpark was playing that way,” Gibson said of ETSU’s Thomas Stadium. “The wind was blowing a bit out, so it was a big offensive series. I was really impressed with ETSU, but we got some good starts and the bats just jumped on them and got us the runs we needed.”

Mercer scored five runs in the first three innings of Game 1, then had a six-spot in the opening frame of Game 3. The Bears smashed six homers in the series and spread them out relatively evenly across all three games, but more impressive was their consistent hitting — Mercer had 12, 11 and 14 hits in the contests, respectively.

It feels like the group is poised every game, according to their head coach.

“It’s wild how locked in they are. It’s felt like for the past month, every game has been the most important game of the year,” Gibson said. “With this series, even, they didn’t just want a share of the conference, they wanted the whole thing. So they played for it.”

With the regular season behind them, the Bears head to Greenville for the SoCon tournament, which begins Wednesday. Mercer has a double-bye as the No. 1 and plays its first game at 9 a.m. Thursday. The Bears could face VMI, The Citadel or Wofford, depending on who comes out of Wednesday’s games victorious.

Regardless, Mercer will stick to the pitching formula that’s held firm all year: Garrett Lambert will start their first game, while Miguel Hugas will start the second. 

Lambert, the conference’s Freshman of the Year winner as a medical redshirt, has been solid with a 4.55 ERA — the eighth-best individual mark in the SoCon — while Hugas recently had a pair of sparkling, seven-inning performances against two of Mercer’s possible early opponents, VMI and Wofford.

All of this has led to Mercer earning some national notoriety. After the Bears’ upset win over Georgia Tech earlier this year, the game’s ESPN announcers commented on Mercer potentially making the tournament as an at-large team if they do not win the SoCon tournament.

“I just keep doing the same things, I have since the first game of the season. It’s consistency,” Gibson said. “The challenging thing with guys nowadays is that information is available everywhere. They know what the expectations are, but I tell them that we control our own destiny.”

The Bears begin their tournament run with a game at 9 a.m. Thursday. If they win, they play in the semifinal at 9 a.m. Friday. The conference championship game is Saturday at 7:30 p.m.